The choice of Haspel, a career spy, immediately prompted cries of outrage across the country due to her active role in the CIA’s illegal torture program during the Bush administration.

Under CIA Director George Tenet, the CIA constructed a number of secret “black site” prison complexes in numerous foreign nations without informing the host countries that they would be used to illegally detain and torture suspected “terrorists” without trial, leading to the deaths of two prisoners.

During today’s hearing, Haspel attempted to argue that she had destroyed the tapes of the torture in order to protect the identities of the agents conducting the torture. When pressed as to why she hadn’t ordered the tapes digitally altered to blur out the faces and preserved a digital, “sanitized” version, she weakly punted, mumbling “I’m simply not a technical person.”

Senator Marin Heinrich (D-NM) was not happy with this answer. Indeed, it does not inspire confidence to hear the proposed nominee for an agency that oversees $15 billion worth of spying operations, death squads, and God only knows what else to say that she is not a “technical person.”

Haspel went on to promisethat she would not restart the torture program, even if ordered to by President Trump, but her words ring hollow with her declaration that she doesn’t believe that Trump would tell her to do so.

Trump’s own words make it clear that she either is deliberately whitewashing the president or is stunningly uninformed about the man she is about to work for.

TRUMP in 2016: "Torture works, okay, folks? I have these guys, 'torture doesn't work.' Believe me, it works, okay? And waterboarding is your minor form. Some people say it's not actually torture. Let's assume it is. Waterboarding, absolutely fine. We should go much stronger." pic.twitter.com/znF4odUm7Y

The Central Intelligence Agency is responsible for some of the worst excesses in America’s short but brutal history; the amount of human suffering caused by the coups they supported, the democratically elected socialist governments they toppled, the right-wing death squads they armed, and their illegal torture program cannot be quantified.

The United States Senate cannot confirm a woman who has shown she is willing to commit unforgivable crimes just because she was “following orders.” Our nation’s most dangerous intelligence agency requires a person with a demonstrated ethical backbone and the moral willpower to resist the President’s cruelest impulses – and Gina Haspel has proven she is not that person.